An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
